soft circuits for livelihood and education in india circuits for livelihood and education in india...
TRANSCRIPT
Soft Circuits for Livelihood and Education in India
Margaret Minsky †1, Nagarajan Akshay‡2, Natarajan Amritha‡, Suresh Anila‡, Anjali C. Nair‡,
Ajana Gopalan‡, Rao R. Bhavani‡3
†Amherst, MA, USA
‡AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Amritapuri, Kerala, India [email protected],
ABSTRACT
A workshop on the design of soft circuits in the contexts of
undergraduate engineering education and empowerment of rural,
economically disadvantaged women in India was conducted at
Amrita University in Kerala, India. We report that the soft-circuit
workshop complemented existing undergraduate engineering
education with increased expressivity, initiative, improvisational
engineering skills, and integration of hardware and software skills.
The workshop participants also explored the viability of the soft-
circuit experience as a source of livelihood and technical
education for rural women, and developed a Livelihood-Education
plan that will be piloted with rural women who are in vocational
training, over 60% of whom have dropped out of formal schooling
before completing 9th grade. We highlight aspects of our
workshop and the resulting economic and educational
empowerment plan that are particular to cultural contexts of
women in India, to vocational training of underserved populations
in India, and to undergraduate engineering education in India.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.3.0 [Computers and Education]: General; H.5.2 [Information
Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces;
General Terms
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.
Keywords
Soft circuits, education, vocational training, e-textiles, hands-on engineering, paper craft, creativity, informal learning
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Context: Vocational Education and
Empowerment of Women through Computer-
Based learning Economic development efforts in developing nations can be better
addressed by increased participation of women in education and
employment. Women who are educated and are employed also
raise healthier, better-educated children. Ammachi Labs’ SAVE1
and WE2 projects for computer-based vocational training have
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted provided that copies are not made or
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this
notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee.
FabLearn 2013, October 27-28, 2013, Stanford, California, United States.
Copyright belongs to author(s).
Fig. 1. Soft-circuit workshop participant discusses electronics
and marketing with recent graduates of vocational fabric
painting course
provided education and potential for livelihood to over 2500
women in rural and tribal India through vocational courses [1].
Sixty two percent of the women who have benefitted from the
training have dropped out of formal education before tenth grade;
none of them have gone to post-secondary education.
The women use computer-based multimodal interfaces, including
haptic interfaces, during their training [2]. In addition to the
content of the vocational programs themselves, this empowers
them in increased social status due to their familiarity with
computer technology, as documented in the experience of women
trained in certified plumbing repair, and in training for
construction trades [3].
In rural India, arts and crafts play an important part in people’s
lives [4][5]. Ammachi Labs’ computerized vocational education
and training includes craft production such as fabric painting,
ornamental jewelry making, soap making and flower arrangement
as well as technical courses such as plumbing, motorcycle repair,
and carpentry [6]. Cultivating technical knowledge empowers
women to work in all these vocational areas.
1.2 Soft Circuits Workshop A soft circuit design workshop at Ammachi Labs was initially
conceived as an opportunity for recent engineering graduates to
1 Sakshat Amrita Vocational Education is an Amrita University
initiative. 2 The Women Empowerment is a project of Amrita University supported by grants from the United Nations Democracy Fund.
learn skills in constructing simple circuits and Arduino controllers
on textiles, to reflect on their own learning, to demonstrate e-
textile embellishment in the context of Indian traditional clothing,
and to report on the feasibility and applicability of craft-based
electronics projects in vocational training.
Four recent graduates from undergraduate EE and CS programs
participated for three weeks. The plan presented to them was to
design increasingly complex circuits on textiles using conductive
thread, electronic components, and Arduino control programming,
with a final project to wire a decorative sari with lights and
possibly movement sensors.
We provided textiles, conductive threads, a limited selection of
conductive paints and foils, conventional electronic components,
and some LilyPad components [7]. Participants used Arduino and LilyPad Arduino controllers for some of the projects.
We depended on information and techniques for textiles and paper
soft-circuits from websites and publications from the soft circuit
and maker communities, particularly Jie Qi’s paper craft and
workshop experience [8][9], Hannah Perner-Wilson’s e-textiles
experience and soft-circuit resources [10][11][12], Kobakant
collective’s projects and resources [13[14], Leah Buechley’s work [15][16], and MIT’s High-Low Tech Group [17].
The goals of the workshop were:
• To explore whether soft-circuit engineering could complement
the training of recent undergraduate engineers and add to their
skills, design inspiration, and enhance their abilities to contribute
to research projects as research staff members.
• To explore whether soft-circuit, crafts-based projects could
become a component of vocational training for rural,
economically disadvantaged women in India.
1.3 Why Soft-Circuits? Craft-based techniques for building electronics exist at a nexus of
influences which make soft-circuits an appropriate experiment
within this laboratory in India.
1.3.1 Learning Soft-circuit technology research has grown within the intersection
of the maker movement and constructionist learning [18]. It
combines project-based learning with aesthetic expression by
participants. By analogy to Papert’s philosophy of bringing big
ideas from mathematics and computing to beginning learners
through “doing mathematics” rather than “learning mathematics”
[19], it is an environment in which one “does engineering” using
familiar, everyday objects rather than “learning engineering” with
arcane materials and limited-scope problems to solve.
1.3.2 Craft and Decorative Traditions Textiles, fashion, and papercraft are appealing areas in which to
provide learning environments, especially for women, because
crafts in general and sewing in particular are associated with
women’s expertise in many cultures. Many craft traditions involve
flexible materials, and often decorative and functional concerns
have equal status in the design of artifacts; adding electronics
leads to rich challenges and opportunities.
1.4 Livelihood-Education Plan launched for
Rural Women and Undergraduates The results of the workshop were:
• Participants had increased expressivity, initiative,
improvisational engineering skills, and integration of hardware
and software skills.
• Participants extensively interacted with rural women through a
demo, and were able to survey the women’s responses as well as
have informal discussions with them.
The program was immediately expanded to offer soft-circuit
experience to undergraduates.
On the basis of the experiences of the workshop participants and
the feedback from rural women, within six months the laboratory
developed, and is piloting, a Livelihood-Education plan
integrating soft-circuit engineering and electronic crafts-based
products directly into its ongoing, proven vocational course model for rural women.
Soft-circuit training will be added to an existing vocational course
(jewelry-making). Women in this course will make soft-circuit
products for sale through local markets, and also make soft-circuit
educational workshop kits that they sell to the university to enable
undergraduate workshops. The plan creates a cycle of creative project ideas for the rural women and the undergraduates.
Fig. 2. Flow of empowerment, income, and ideas:
Undergraduate Education tied to Rural Women
Empowerment
2. CASE STUDY OF PARTICIPANT
EXPERIENCE
2.1 Workshop Participants’ Initiatives Within the first two days, participants took initiative to create
lighted interactive cards and lighted jewelry in addition to the
assigned textile projects. This spontaneous contribution highlights
the resonance that craft-based engineering has with promotion of
individual initiative and expression [Jie Qi: personal
communication]. The participants were able to shift the direction
of the workshop by initiating those projects themselves. They
made the case that the scale of jewelry and paper, and the
potential for creating many different projects in a short time, was
more culturally relevant than creating a single elaborate textile
worn by only one person at a time.
One of the more elaborate projects was a lighted card (see Figure
3). The participants created and drew a cartoon character; the
team members shared duties in designing the layout of the soft-
Fig. 3. Participants making greeting card containing LEDs
during the soft circuits workshop
circuit connections, debugging the many electronics, materials
and connectivity issues that arose. They iterated through many
designs for a switch that would allow the card to light when
opened.
While creating this project, the participants pioneered an informal
connection between the engineering and the creative/media
divisions of the laboratory at a grassroots level: they took
initiative to go to the creative/media department (in another area
of the building) and ask for materials and help for the card
illustration. Although Ammachi Labs integrates the two divisions
formally in its vocational-education platform, it was previously
unusual for junior staff members to seek informal collaboration
and sharing of resources across divisions.
The participants’ responses to the proposition that soft-circuit,
craft-based engineering would be particularly appealing to women
in India were subtle, unexpected, and in contrast with experiences
in the USA. Participants were surprised to hear that young women
in the USA “drop out” of STEM. They proposed that young
university-bound women in India’s Kerala state aspire to stay in
STEM (especially engineering) and that most universities were
gender-balanced in engineering programs. On the other hand,
they asserted that women are preferentially and almost universally
well-trained in India at a young age in sewing, crafts and drawing,
which made the soft-circuits work resonant and engaging for
women even at university level. That they could combine craft
skills with formal education, particularly engineering education, was unexpected and was a source of creative satisfaction.
Although we changed the workshop focus primarily to paper craft
and jewelry areas, we maintained breadth in textiles. India has a
rich heritage of textile arts and crafts. Glitter, mirror works, and
silver and gold thread on embroidered and woven fabrics are
highly developed [20]. We tested the conductivity of metallic
threads in fragments of saris and found that many are conductive
enough for lighting and sensing circuits. Further work is planned
investigating whether longer runs of thread and pads formed by
floral designs will allow satisfying incorporation of lighting and
other circuits into traditional patterns. We are inspired by related
work on incorporating conducting and sensing threads in custom
woven [21] and knit [22] fabrics with a combination of aesthetic and electronic purposes.
2.2 Demonstration for Rural Women and
Survey of Rural Women An opportunity to demonstrate the workshop projects to a large
group of rural women already participating in vocational
education programs capped the workshop experience (Figure 4)
(Figure 1). The participants demonstrated their projects to
eighteen groups of women, from all areas of Kerala, trained by the
SAVE program in fabric painting and in certified plumbing repair.
These groups were surveyed with a structured set of questions
about their potential personal interest in learning soft circuit
technology and crafts, and their economic thoughts about the
viability of such crafts as a livelihood enhancement. The venue also provided demo time to groups of the general public.
Preparations for the demo included constructing survey questions
in both Malayalam and English, informal commissioning of
concept art for wedding jewelry from the creative/media division,
practice of setup and repairs of projects, venue preview and
lighting adjustment, and preparing a kit of replacement parts and
repair tools in order to successfully conduct presentation and data-
gathering. The participants gained new engineering and
communication skills to prepare an off-site demonstration capable
of handling hundreds of visitors during a day.
Fig. 4. Demonstration station. English name translations: for
jewelry earring “Beauty”, for card “Blissful Light”
The response of rural women to the demonstration and survey was
positive and engaged, they asked questions about potential
economic viability and expressed desire to learn electronics and how to make the crafts.
2.3 Expansion to Livelihood-Education Plan During the six months after the workshop and demonstration,
participants have continued to teach undergraduate interns at the
lab. The participant team and undergraduates have built projects
of increasing artistic, hardware, and software complexity
including sensor bracelets and beaded lighted necklaces (see
Figure 5). One undergraduate created an innovative conductive-
thread variable potentiometer inspired by the soft circuit button
switch [12] and felt confident to enter it in an Instructables contest [23].
Reflecting on the educational advantages of soft-circuit projects to
undergraduate engineering students, as well as goals for rural
women (additional sources of livelihood, social status through
collaboration with a university education project), the Education-
Livelihood Plan was developed (see Figure 4). To implement it,
the team is constructing soft-circuit kits on a breadboard philosophy based on work by Leah Buechley [24].
Using these kit materials, the pilot project will run in the jewelry-
making vocational training course for rural women. Women will
be trained to make both jewelry products and soft-circuit kits. The
lighting-embellished jewelry will be sold by the makers locally,
and their soft-circuit educational kits will be sold to the university
for a planned series of workshops, run by undergraduates, for undergraduate clubs and courses.
Fig. 5 Samples of various soft circuit based products created
by participants at Amrita University.
The team trained through our workshop and its extension to
undergraduates will encourage the newly involved undergraduates
innovate, modify the kits, and give feedback, possibly creating new kit ideas.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We benefitted substantially from ongoing work by Gayatri S., (CS
undergraduate, Amrita U.), discussions with Jie Qi (MIT Media
Lab), Ken Salisbury (Stanford U.) and Allison Druin (U. of
Maryland), sari material from the Amrita Tailor Shop, enthusiastic
project and demo help from Reshma, technical and sourcing help
from Deepu S, Unni and Ranjit, and artwork and ideas from artists in the media/creative division of AMMACHI Labs.
REFERENCES [1] Ammachi Labs, “The Women Empowerment Project Third
Milestone Report to the United Nations Democracy Fund”.
http://www2.amrita.edu/centers/ammachi/projects/women-empowerment
[2] N. Akshay, S. Deepu, E. S. Rahul, R. Ranjith, J. Jose, R.
Unnikrishnan, Rao R. Bhavani, “Design and Evaluation of a
Haptic Simulator for Vocational Skill Training and
Assessment”, 39th
Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Vienna, 2013.
[3] Ammachi Labs, “International Workshop on Haptics and
Computerized Learning for Skill Development in Vocational
Education”, Technology Enhanced Education (ICTEE),
IEEE International Conference on, IEEE, 2012.
http://www2.amrita.edu/index.php/centers/ammachi/blog/int
ernational-workshop-on-haptics-and-computerized-learning-
for-skill-development-in-vocational-education/
[4] Tyagi, Amar. “Let's Know Handicrafts of India”. Star
Publications, 2008.
[5] Perivoliotis-Chryssovergis, Margaret. "Long distance design
education applied to rural women." International Journal of
Education and Development using ICT2.2 (2006).
[6] Bhavani, B., Srividya Sheshadri, and R. Unnikrishnan.
"Vocational education technology: Rural India." Proceedings
of the 1st Amrita ACM-W Celebration on Women in Computing in India. ACM, 2010.
[7] Buechley, L., Eisenberg, M., Catchen, J. and Crockett, A.
2008. The LilyPad Arduino: Using Computational Textiles to
Investigate Engagement, Aesthetics, and Diversity in
Computer Science Education. In Proceedings of CHI, pp. 423-432.
[8] Qi, J., and L. Buechley. 2010. Electronic Popables: exploring
paper-based computing through an interactive pop-up book.
In Proceedings of the Fourth international Conference on
Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied interaction (Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, January 24 – 27, 2010). TEI ‘10. ACM,
New York, NY, 121-128.
[9] Qi, Jie,, “The fine art of electronics : paper-based circuits for
creative expression”, MIT M.S. Dissertation, 2012 http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/77811
[10] Perner-Wilson, Hannah, Leah Buechley, and Mika Satomi.
"Handcrafting textile interfaces from a kit-of-no-parts."
Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied interaction. ACM, 2011.
[11] Perner-Wilson, Hannah, and Mika Satomi. "DIY Wearable
technology." ISEA 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 2009.
[12] Perner-Wilson, Hannah, Plusea Soft Button Switch http://www.plusea.at/?p=939
[13] Kobakant, “Embroidered Potentiometers”, 2010, http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=2331
[14] Kobakant (Satomi, Mika & Perner-Wilson, Hannah), “ITM
Project”, 2012, http://www.kobakant.at/?p=432
[15] Lilypond, “LilyPond is a new site that allows people to
document and share projects that blend electronics and
textiles.” 2004. http://lilypond.media.mit.edu/resources
[16] Buechley, Leah, and Hannah Perner-Wilson. "Crafting
technology: Reimagining the processes, materials, and
cultures of electronics." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 19.3 2012: 21.
[17] Lovell, Emily, “Getting Hands-On with Soft Circuits”, 2010, http://web.media.mit.edu/~emme/guide.pdf
[18] Martinez, Sylvia Libow, Stager, Gary S., “Invent To Learn:
Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom”, Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2013
[19] Papert, Seymour, “Teaching Children to be Mathematicians
vs. Teaching about Mathematics”, MIT Logo Memo No. 4, 1971, available at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5837
[20] Singh, Amrita. “A Profile of Banares Silk Sarees“, Diss.,
University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad, Karnataka, India, 2008.
[21] Kobakant, Resources, http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/
[22] Dion, Genevieve, “Shima Seiki Haute Technology
Laboratory”, Phildelphia, PA, 2013
http://drexel.edu/excite/research/Shima%20Seiki%20Haute%20Tech%20Lab/
[23] Gayatri S, “How to make a Soft Potentiometer”, Instructables
2013, http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-and-use-a-soft-potentiometer-to-control-the-b/
[24] Buechley, L.. “A construction kit for electronic textiles.” In
Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), pp. 83–90, .2006